Report sounds alarm on global warming

Calling climate change "the biggest single threat to wildlife in this country," the National Wildlife Federation last week issued a report that attempts to convey the extent of that threat.

Dave Golowenski, For The Columbus Dispatch

Calling climate change “the biggest single threat to wildlife in this country,” the National Wildlife Federation last week issued a report that attempts to convey the extent of that threat.

“This isn’t about making predictions,” said federation senior scientist Amanda Staudt, one of the report authors, during a teleconference on Wednesday. “It’s happening here and now.”

Entitled “Wildlife in a Warming World: Confronting the Climate Crisis,” the 48-page report describes how weather extremes that include heat, drought and anomalous precipitation are affecting the plants and animals in eight regions of the United States.

At least three sections of the report — Great Lakes, Appalachian Mountains and, to a lesser extent, the Great Plains — address impacts related to Ohio and its residents.

Although the report contains few surprises, it assembles evidence of an unfolding calamity whose scope might not be known to a public that generally gets its information in TV sound bites and disconnected news briefs.

“Many of these things have been around piecemeal before,” Staudt said. “Our aim was to put them together into a coherent story.”

Change always has been a fact of life. Whenever change has occurred at a geological pace, animals and plants have adapted, sometimes by the slow transformation into different species.But a 7- to 11-degree warming of global temperatures during a period of 100 years would guarantee the demise of many species as they are forced into an evolutionary dead end.

Many species already are under stress. For instance, 177 of 305 bird species in North America have shifted their range northward by an average of 35 miles during the past four decades as warming has become pronounced. Forests are moving north into the Arctic tundra, broadleaf trees are replacing conifers in Vermont, and pine beetles have ravaged enormous tracts of forest in the West.

Some plants and animals have been extending their range across North America by up to 12 miles each year since 1990. For most of the 20th century, species movement averaged about 0.4 of a mile annually, the report says.

Areas in the West, Southwest and Plains affected by a prolonged drought in 2012 could lose a third of their trees.

“This is just beginning,” Janna Beckerman, a plant pathologist at Purdue University, told USA Today. “I suspect we’ll see trees still dying for the next two or three years” because of the 2012 drought.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center predicts another dry, hot summer for much of the United States already hard hit.

Last month, a report by U.S. Forest Service scientists said more troubles lie ahead for the endangered Indiana bat, which the service said is likely to be pushed out of its Midwest breeding territory, including Ohio, by rising temperatures. If Indiana bats are to survive, the service said, they will have to grab a foothold in the higher Appalachians and the northeast states.

Also close to home, algae blooms on Lake Erie in 2011 can be tied to an unusually rainy spring that year that washed tremendous amounts of agricultural fertilizers into the water column. The blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, produce deadly toxins. When the algae masses die, their decomposition sucks oxygen from the water, contributing to so-called “dead zones” where fish and other oxygen-dependent creatures can perish if they can’t escape.

Climate models suggest that the Great Lakes region, while hotter and drier overall, will experience a general increase in spring rains during the coming decades, Staudt said, which means the runoff/algae problem will need fixing.

Diminished periods of winter ice will make the Great Lakes warmer and increase evaporation. Such change will favor warm-water species, such as carps, sheepshead, catfish, white bass and white perch, and be less friendly toward trout, walleye, yellow perch, whitefish and salmon.

Thousands of northern pike, also a cool-water species, went belly up last summer when river temperatures climbed to as high as 90 degrees in southern Michigan.

Ohio’s Black River, a Lake Erie tributary largely given over to the steel industry near its mouth during the 20th century, gets special mention in the federation report. Although the river has undergone a slow recovery as the result of costly cleanup efforts, gains remain fragile. The river could lose half its species by mid-century as a result of the changing weather patterns.

Duck hunters could be facing tougher times if heat and drought shrink the prairie potholes on the summer breeding grounds in the Upper Midwest and Plains.

Any solution to climate change will involve diminished use of fuels that pump carbon into the atmosphere, the federation report said.

To download a copy of the report, Wildlife in a Warming World, visit the National Wildlife Federation website at nwf.org.